Bring In The Clones! QQ Launches Chinese Social Network, Xiaoyou

QQ Soft has launched a new service called QQ Xiaoyou.Â QQ Xiaoyou is a social network with a demographic targeted towards universities and high school students.Â Xiaoyou is the Chinese Pinyin of “Alumni.”Â Only QQ.com users are allowed to use the service for now.

QQ Xiaoyou has a similar UI as Facebook and is looking to directly compete with another Chinese Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com.Â QQ Xiaoyou requires users to provide real names, real photos, and will strictly verify the information.Â QQ Xiaoyou takes 3 days to approve all of you information.Â QQ attempted to launch a service called QQ Campus in September 2007, but that did not go so well.Â QQ Xiaoyou is expected to be much better.

While QQ.com was preparing their Chinese Facebook clone competitor, Xiaonei borrowed another idea from Facebook recently.Â Xiaonei decided to announce that they are create an Open Developer Platform for users to create third party applications.

QQ.com is currently the most popular IM software in China.Â QQ is ranked #19 on Alexa and is owned by Tencent Holdings LtdÂ (HKG:0700).Â

QQ.com is part of pop culture in China as the company also provides games, ringtone downloads, and virtual pets.Â QQ.com has 317.9 million active accounts of which 160 million are based in China.Â Tencent is based in Shenzhen, China.Â Tencent started in 1998, launched the IM software in 1999. had an IPO in 2004, and brought QQ Games to America around October 2007.